Innovation as Bush Fire

Unexpected Sources of Breakthrough Technologies

Hedy Lamarr, MGM photo, from Wikimedia Commons. Patent #2,292,287, “Secret Communication System,” from Jewish Women’s Archive. Sketch from patent application, from Wikimedia Commons. All public domain.

“Innovation is like a bush fire that burns brightly for a short time, then dies down before flaring up somewhere else.” — Matt Ridley

The most striking technological breakthroughs often come from the most unexpected sources. Established companies are notoriously poor at foreseeing innovation and tend to focus on preserving their existing products. Governments strongly incentivize risk-aversion and groupthink. As Matt Ridley wrote in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves:

“That is why Apple, not IBM, perfected the personal computer, why the Wright brothers, not the French army, invented powered flight, why Jonas Salk, not the British National Health Service, invented a polio vaccine, why Amazon, not the Post Office, invented one-click ordering and why a Finnish lumber-supply company, not a national telephone monopoly, became the world leader in mobile telephony.”

None of the innovators described in the three tales below had the sort of résumés that would attract government research grants or corporate buy-in. Hedy Lamarr was a world-famous actress and George Antheil was a symphonic composer—but out of their mutual detestation of Nazi Germany, they teamed up to invent an encryption technology that arguably paved the way for wi-fi, bluetooth, and GPS. Milton and Norman Ende were unknown doctors who pioneered a mode of cancer treatment in the small-town hospital where I was born. Richard van As was an injured South African woodworker who partnered with Ivan Owen, an American puppet-maker, to revolutionize the technology and distribution of prosthetic limbs.

These three stories are lightly edited excerpts from my own 2014 monograph, Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care, published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, October 2014. That work explores the role of, potential for, and obstacles to innovation in healthcare.

Actress and Composer: Unexpected Provenance of Encryption

George Antheil. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

Modern Wi-Fi and GPS devices rely on an encryption technique called frequency-hopping spread spectrum, in which the signal is sent over a sequence of different frequencies rather than just one. The idea originated early in the 20th century, but it was made practical for military usage by a pair of inventors during World War II. The first of these inventors was, astonishingly, actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr had been married to a Nazi-sympathizing Austrian weapons dealer whom she grew to hate and fear. He often brought her to his business meetings, apparently to show off his trophy wife. Expected to sit silently, Lamarr listened carefully to the conversations. By the time she left Europe she had secretly acquired a world-class expertise in high-tech weaponry. In the United States she developed the idea of spread-spectrum technology as a way of preventing the Nazis from jamming the signals directing the US Navy’s radio-controlled torpedoes.

She needed some help rendering her idea practical, and turned to a friend, George Antheil, a symphonic composer who was prominent for a time on the Paris arts scene. Lamarr and Antheil had to devise a method for synchronizing the frequency-hopping on the transmitting and receiving ends of the signal. Antheil recalled that in the 1920s he had written a piece for Fernand Léger’s film Ballet Mécanique (1924) in which 16 pianos were synchronized by means of piano rolls. He suggested that this technique could be adapted to radio-controlled torpedoes. Lamarr and Antheil developed the necessary process and successfully patented it. Though U.S. forces didn’t use the technology during World War II, they eventually used it during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to prevent the Soviets from jamming their communications.

Needless to say, the government, established war contractors, and universities were not likely to have selected a Hollywood actress and an avant-garde symphonic composer to devise a key component of naval weaponry. But this story is not an isolated case. Disruptive innovation almost always comes from unexpected sources.

In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Their invention evolved into the encryption methods used today in Bluetooth and other consumer electronic devices.

Lamarr’s role as inventor is described by Fleming Meeks in “I Guess They Just Take and Forget about a Person.” Forbes, May 14, 1990, 136-38.

Small-Town Doctor, Big-Time Discovery

Drs. Milton Ende & Norman Ende. Photo courtesy of Norman Ende.

Milton Ende, (1919-2007), an MD who grew up with my mother in Petersburg, Virginia, was at once a colorful character and a brilliant diagnostician. In a small, conservative town with sedate tastes, he sported luminescent sports coats and bow ties that seemed poised to take flight. His high-pitched machine gun of a voice could swing dramatically from an exuberant analysis of baseball business to a deadly serious focus on the health of a patient.

He could breeze into an examining room for a blink of eye and discern patterns that eluded others. When my aunt with chronic health problems became critically ill a half-century or so ago, he asked a question no one over the years had thought to ask: “Has anyone ever tested her for multiple sclerosis?” They hadn’t, until his quick mind inferred that key—and correct—diagnosis in an instant.

In the early 1960s, Ende wondered why infants rarely contracted cancers. He and his brother Norman Ende (1924-2021), also an MD, thought that perhaps something in infants’ blood inhibited cancer growth—and they wanted to test whether transplanting blood from infants to cancer sufferers might have therapeutic benefits. Ethically, they couldn’t extract blood from infants for this purpose, but they realized they could use infant blood cells from the umbilical cords (and later placentas) of newborns. Cord blood, we now know, is rich in stem cells.

The brothers transplanted cord blood into cancer sufferers whose cases were deemed hopeless and who volunteered for the experiment. These experiments cured no one, but some patients exhibited temporary and at times substantial and prolonged improvement—enough to give the doctors hope that they were on to something.

Funders and major medical journals routinely rejected the Endes’ work, so in 1972, they reported their first findings in a regional publication, the Virginia Medical Monthly. In medicine, credentialism is real, and sometimes a real problem. During the first few years after 2000, some finally recognized the importance of the Endes’ work, describing them as the earliest of all pioneers in stem-cell therapy. While the Endes never received their full measure of recognition, other pioneers gave rise to a vast array of stem-cell research and therapies.

Could the Endes’ experiment occur today? Physicians have told me almost certainly not. Whatever their considerable virtues, institutional review boards would likely be an obstacle. Fears of malpractice litigation would likely dissuade most physicians from such experimentation, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is more active in proscribing novel practices nowadays. Administrative burdens have shifted physicians from solo practices (such as Milton Ende’s) into group practices that would likely be more wary of experimentation. The late Richard Schieken, MD, a close friend and pediatric cardiologist, once reminisced to me about grassroots innovation in his field 40 years earlier. At that time a burst of new surgical procedures emerged via improvisation and experimentation—almost on the fly.

The Endes published their findings as, “Hematopoietic Transplantation by Means of Fetal (Cord) Blood: A New Method,” Virginia Medical Monthly 99, no. 3 (March 1972): 276–79.

Their work was described decades later in Virginia C. Hughes, “Cord Blood Transplantation: Hallmarks of the 20th Century,” Laboratory Medicine 31, no. 12 (December 2000): 672–78.

In a paper coauthored with scholar Dina Gould Halme, former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler notes that work with stem cells requires the submission of an investigational new drug application to the FDA before human studies can begin. Halme and Kessler, “FDA Regulations of Stem-Cell-Based Therapies,” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (October 19, 2006): 1730.

e-NABLE prosthetic, c.2014. Owned and photographed by Robert Graboyes.

3-D Printing: Hands across the Water

In the mid 2010s, Leon was a Massachusetts boy in his early teens, born with no fingers on his left hand. Prosthetics were expensive and cumbersome—costing perhaps $25,000-$80,000. The cost often hit patients in the form of thousands of dollars of deductibles, copays, and caps. Leon’s father, Paul McCarthy, was determined to find a less-expensive alternative.

Searching the Internet, McCarthy discovered the serendipitous collaboration of Richard Van As, Ivan Owen, and Yolandi Dippenaar. In South Africa, Van As, a woodworker, had accidentally cut off two fingers and mangled two others. In Washington State, Owen, a puppet-maker, was known as a skilled builder of puppet hands. Dippenaar, also South African, gave birth to a child, Liam, with no fingers on his dominant right hand.

On the web, Van As saw Owen’s work, and the two collaborated to produce inexpensive but workable prosthetics using 3-D printers. Dippenaar caught wind of their work and recruited them to create a hand for five-year-old Liam—one whose fingers could respond to the movement of muscles in his arm. While Van As had originally sought only to construct a hand for himself, Dippenaar’s request led him to pursue a larger goal.

Scouring the Internet, McCarthy learned of this new technology and found Owen’s posted manufacturing instructions. Using an inexpensive 3-D printer, he and Leon manufactured a hand costing somewhere in the $10 to $50 range. With his bright green hand, Leon could finally pick up pencils, hold a water bottle, and ride a bicycle. If he broke or outgrew it, $10–$50 would buy another.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, 16-year-old Mason Wilde had been sidelined from football by repeated concussions. Searching for a new activity to occupy his time, he learned of Van As and Owen’s printed hand; it happened Wilde knew a younger child, Matthew, who was missing the fingers on one hand. In his spare time, Wilde constructed a mechanical hand for Matthew.

At the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Jon Schull was (at that time) “a biological psychologist, entrepreneur, community organizer, and director of RIT’s Center for Student Innovation.” Schull became involved with the 3-D hand project and ultimately founded e-NABLE, a network that has attracted thousands of individuals in need of prosthetic hands or interested in building them. Thanks to this network of amateurs, as time passes, the hands have evolved to become more aesthetically pleasing, facile, and—in some cases—unconventional. One father, for example, designed his son’s hand to have opposable thumbs at either end to aid in grasping. The boy became known to schoolmates as “Cool Hand Luke.”

So a woodworker, a puppet-maker, the families of disabled children, a sidelined high school athlete, his younger friend, an academic polymath, and thousands of others scattered around the globe became critical links in an expanding network of tinkerers and inventors. With open-source technologies, network members have been improving the design of these prosthetics, little by little, for a decade. Even the children being fitted for the hands have contributed, devising some radical design features. It’s exactly the process we see with Internet apps—strokes of genius from unexpected places. Notice that this process did not come from the titans of medicine, manufacturing, or government, nor would it have. No panel of experts appointed Van As and Owen to develop the printed hand. And we’ll never know how many tinkerers tried and failed to do something similar.

Thus far, the FDA has not been an impediment to the printed hand. Schull noted in a conversation with me in 2014 that mechanical hands given away for free were not subject to FDA approval. (I believe that’s still true.) If any of the components were motorized, if the prosthetic were a leg, or if builders sold the prosthetics rather than giving them away, they would be subject to the FDA’s long and expensive deliberative processes. This need for permission can effectively block products from ever reaching the market.

Approval issues are likely to become more acute, since 3-D printers also have the capacity to use biological materials in place of plastic. There has already been progress using the printers to produce replacement organs—and there are already moves afoot to ban the use of such technologies.

Lagniappe

Look! A Squirrel!

Innovation, it seems, can come from animals as well as from ex-NASA engineers. Here, engineer Mark Rober builds an obstacle course to prevent squirrels from raiding his birdfeeders. But he builds it in such as way as to give the squirrels a fighting chance at the treasure. The results are eye-opening. For me, the biggest revelation is that when I see a dog barking at a squirrel, I am no longer certain which combatant is more intelligent. The video lasts 20 minutes, and, rest assured, the entertainment value is well worth the time.

Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.